telephones

I rang Telstra to inform them that my phone is suffering from phonopause ( the telegraphic equivalent of menopause) and to see if they could help.

A very nice young man patiently listened to the list of symptoms I described;

• sometimes the phone will not ring and sends all incoming calls to message bank
• one ring then message bank
• rings loudly, no one there
• only one half of the conversation can be heard, I can heard the caller talking and they can't hear me or visa versa.
• sometimes only parts of the conversation can be heard, this has lead to some amusing and annoying conversations. From what I'm hearing I think the conversation is about Soya futures when the other person is talking about store cattle prices.
• other times the phone is obviously bored with the conversation and just hangs up
• even when both parties can hear one another there are many and various noises heard, the most common is a loud clicking. Is the phone going to blow-up?
• the fastest I can get a download is 3.1 kbts, and this only for a few minutes. I think the phone then takes a Valium and has a nice rest before it decides if it will perhaps do a little bit more. With this attitude it can take hours to download virus updates.
• we have had a fair bit of rain here so is that why some callers sound as if they are under water?

The young man said he had the answer to all my problems, the Next G network had a larger footprint than the old CDMA system and was vastly superior in many ways and all of this I could enjoy as soon as I purchase a better handset then all my problems would be solved. When I informed him I was talking about a landline and that we never had CDMA reception out here I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. The phone decided that it had enough and hung-up. It refused to work for the rest of the day.

I think I will just have to bred a race of carrier ducks, it's too wet for pigeons.